The FPS value of a Flash animation is a ballpark figure at best, and it can be impacted by various factors such as how much processing the file has to perform and how much content it has to manipulate.

The movie playing very slow so obviously it's a processing issue. I thought exporting it as a .mov would resolve this, what is strange is how it exports the .mov at 6mins in length when there is only 2mins worth of frames as 25fps! There are movie clips and embedded flv files in the Flash movie yes.

OK, if there are problems playing the published .swf at the correct speed, then that issue will have to be resolved before the frame/time issue can be resolved.

I'd suggest you start pulling out movie clips and the flv.... one at a time and see if you can isolate the source of the problem.

As for frame count, are you including the number of frame in a movie clip in your overall frame count? (a 30 frame mc added to main timeline may take up only one frame of main timeline but still runs for 30 frames).

And you have a .flv embedded directly in the main timeline? That almost never is a good idea.

But it sounds like there is some conflict, infinate looping/iterations for example. Seems like that should be the focus of your fix efforts.

The animation is built like a standard simple flash animation. All timeline based. The graphics are taken straight from Illustrator into Flash also and then converted into graphics/movie clips and animated. There are a couple of flv files in there too but when I remove them the issue persists.

There is no actionscript or anything fancy, it's constructed just as a normal timeline, tween based animation. All at 25fps.

Were the graphics created at the exact dimensions used in Flash? or are they being scaled up or down once they are imported into Flash? What are the w/h dimensions and file size of a typical graphic before importing to Flash.

Doesn't sound like an enourmously large file ...large dimensions....but still should work.

When you say "scaled down when imported into Flash directly from Illustrator"... so the graphics are larger and Flash is having to do that scaling? That is almost never a good idea. All assets should be created at the exact dimensions used in Flash so no scaling has to happen.

But you are saying that the .swf does not and never has run at the correct pace, it runs slower than you would like... is that correct?

Have you played around with the frame rate... increase or decrease, just to see the reaction? If there is some type of computation or graphic display problem, lowering the frame rate would give more time for those computations/redraws, so yes because of more frames the time is also longer but you may see that the increase in time is not proportional to the decrease in frame rate. Then do the same by increasing frame rate.

So for example, double the frame rate (50fps) should result in an animation of half the time length. So if the current 3000 frames take 6 min @25fps, you could theorize that @50fps it should take around 3 min... if it takes even longer, then it might just be that the graphic redraws or computations or really overwhelming the machine.

On the other hand, lowering the frame rate may give the machine time to "catch up" and not run as slow as it is now.

You might also try to reduce greatly the display size to see if that allows more rapid redraws.

If you'd like, post a link to the .swf and let us take a look. There may be other suggestions.

You will see the audio doesn't sync as the movie slows down. A good example is about 30secs in when the head appears and the word 'dopamine' animates in, the narrator mentions this word before the animation the head and brain plays. This animation then takes ages to play despite only being 670 frames long.

I have started playing around with the frame rate as you mention. It does speed it up but is still out of sync so I'll have to try to match it accordingly. I imagine this will speed up also when I publish it as a .mov also?